Friday, June 1, 2012

Off the rack

I did not
look forward to summer the way I believed most children did.

My family
lived in the same house for all of my school years, and it was not within
walking or bicycling distance of town, or much of anything else. There was a
cornfield across the street. There was a Catholic seminary a mile down the road
in one direction, and – no fooling – a prison one-quarter mile in the other
direction.

There were six
or seven other children close in age in the houses along the road, but most
were deemed, by my parents, too unpredictable to play on our property, and the
few exceptions would grow restless, as I did, trying to keep my wheelchair-bound
brother amused, playing with action figures in the shade while the open spaces
beckoned.

I missed the
social aspects of school during the summer. Also, I had to work.

We had
enough property that the job of mowing the lawn, which fell to me at a young
age, could be finished, if the weather cooperated, just in time to start all
over again. We had a vegetable garden, taking up about one-sixteenth of an
acre, which needed to be tilled and planted and watered and hoed. We had
neighbors who needed their horses fed during some busy time in their lives, or
help masking a muscle car they were going to paint, and my parents made me
available to them.

During the
final weeks of the school year, I’d feel the haze and the isolation approaching,
and have only one goal: I had to get to the Rexall drugstore, buy two or three
paperback thrillers, and try to make them last all summer.

The
newsstand at the Rexall was good for a Jack Higgins, a Dick Francis, an
Alistair Maclean; John Jakes and Irwin Shaw (for grownups); the latest Travis
McGee novel; the latest in numbered action series like “The Executioner” or “The
Destroyer”; quickie Pocket books about sensational news stories of the day,
like the Patty Hearst case, or quickie biographies of sports phenomenons like
Mark “The Bird” Fidrych; a novelization of an R-rated movie I wasn’t allowed to
see (but reading the book was okay), like Magnum
Force, or a tie-in to a TV show, like “The Rockford Files.”

The Rexall
was where I bought Black Sunday, Funeral
in Berlin, Coma, Mortal Stakes, The Boys From Brazil – books I picked very carefully,
because I knew I would wind up reading them more than once before the summer
was over. (Without them, I would have spent all of my free time bouncing a
hardball off the well house, like Steve McQueen in solitary confinement in The Great Escape.)

For my
classmates, summer may have meant Little League or the swimming pool, but I
needed the cities of the world, mistaken identity and pursuit, the Fourth
Reich, and underwater knife fights.

I went on to
read more widely, but there’s still nothing that compares to choosing some crappy-looking
mass-market off the rack at a pharmacy or a hospital gift shop or an airport
bookstall.

Most popular
thrillers today are nowhere near as reliable as the ones of my youth. For
starters, they’re padded: Ira Levin’s entire career output would fit inside the
pages of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
They don’t leave you feeling wised-up, the way a really great thriller can. Most
conclude with the opening chapter of the next book in the series, a hateful
practice – oh look, the protagonist survives! – that reeks of publishers conceding,
in a way, that television-watching is now the equal of reading. Eight out of
every ten are (*still?) about genius
serial killers. At the very worst, they can be riddled with
business-action-verbs, and their plots
might hinge on grand left-wing conspiracies. (“My God, they’re planning to…not
torture Muslims!”)

Luckily, it
doesn’t take much poking around to figure out what to avoid.

*I loved Black Sunday, and thought Red Dragon was even better, and I looked
forward to Thomas Harris publishing one great thriller every five or six years,
completely different in subject matter than the previous book, with a color in
the title; The Silence of the Lambs
broke my heart a little.